The Great Wall of China was ranked first overall with 19.8 million visitors, followed by three Disney theme parks. Britain's greatest attraction was apparently not Stonehenge, the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace but a family fun park in Milton Keynes.

A spokesman for Australia's Tourism & Transport Forum, Rowan Barker, declined to dispute the visitor figures but suggested the Opera House had been short-changed.

"We know that people come to Sydney to see the Opera House," he said. "There is no doubt it is an international drawcard."

But this hand of cards appears to favour Crown.

Meanwhile, new figures show the number of Chinese visiting Australia is continuing to grow and for the first time there are more people from China coming here than from the UK, Robert Upe reports.

The latest figures from Tourism Research Australia released Wednesday show that Chinese arrivals increased by 17 per cent in the last year to 573,000, surpassing 558,000 from the UK. New Zealand continues to be the biggest source of visitors with 1,090,896 coming here in the past year.

China had already overtaken Britain as Australia's most valuable tourism market as measured by "'total inbound economic value"' worth more than $3 billion last year.

Overall, visitor numbers in the past year have gone up by 3 per cent for a total of 5,599,797.

Tourism Australia managing director Andrew McEvoy said: "Asia, led by China, continues to be the engine room of international growth. But we're also seeing much more positive numbers coming out of one of our most important traditional markets, the United States." The latest figures show that there were 443,256 visitors from the US in the past year.